When Alameda news writer Karin K. Jensen was a child growing up, her mother Helen Yee Chan Cochran, a Chinese American immigrant daughter, shared stories from her life about her American dream and her dashed hopes along the way to achieving it. Jensen set down her mom’s powerful history in “The Strength of Water, An Asian American Coming of Age Memoir.” (Sibylline Press, 360 pages, $21, Nov. 7, 2025). Local News Matters tapped her for this recap:
“The Strength of Water” illuminates my mother’s journey from 1920s Detroit to wartime China and back to the Bay Area in a story of identity, survival and hope.
Throughout my childhood, my mother told stories of growing up in her father’s Chinese laundry business during the infancy of the auto industry in Detroit, and later in a Cantonese village on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War. She also spoke of what it was like as a live-in domestic worker and teen waitress in mid-20th century California.
There were tales Dickensian in their pathos, of those who take advantage of the poor, of family addictions, painful racism, wartime privations, the perils of marrying too young and then feeling trapped in marriage by social pressures. But there also were stories about the strength of family, the kindness of strangers, and the power, as she put it, of fighting for your little slice of happiness in this world.
Along the way, she revealed history from fascinating perspectives: a woman’s, an immigrant daughter’s and a life on the margins.
The stories felt mythological, so far removed from my vanilla, comfortable, middle-class upbringing in the Bay Area. I grew up in Piedmont in a two-bedroom house next to a mansion so large that it extended from one street to the next; I felt like Nick Carraway in “The Great Gatsby.” How had this transformation happened when my mother had not even had the chance to finish high school? This is what I wanted to record.
The strength of water
Taoism and Confucianism were influential in the culture in which she grew up; when I read the Tao Te Ching as an adult, I was struck by how closely the philosophy aligned with my mother’s approach to life.
A central concept is “wu-wei,” or effortless action. It suggests that less direct intervention leads to better outcomes. For instance, if someone is coming at you with great force, rather than trying to meet them equally, you might move with the incoming force to reduce its effect, then roll with it to throw your opponent off balance. It’s a technique used in martial arts.
The way I saw my mother implementing it was in her reaction to people’s bad behavior. I never heard her say, “Oh, I’ll give her a piece of my mind” or “Boy, I’ll take him to the cleaners.” I felt she viewed people’s bad behavior as their own reward, something that would lead to their self-destruction without her interference. She disengaged, focused on her path, and flowed around them.
When she was going through a divorce, most of her in-laws quietly withdrew from her, but one sister-in-law, in a fit of spite, poured sugar into her gas tank, damaging the car. My mother was upset, but rather than responding in anger, she viewed it as the final parting blow of a painful marriage, and further impetus to make a fresh start. She and her sister-in-law lived on the same block of a poor neighborhood in Oakland. She started shopping for a new home.
A verse in the Tao Te Ching that says, “Water is fluid, soft, yielding. But water will wear away rock…what is soft is strong” reminded me of my mother. She persisted; she kept flowing, whether around or over or seeping through cracks.
As a divorced, minority woman in 1960, procuring a home in a better neighborhood felt nearly impossible, even though she had a 20% down payment and was steadily employed. Her realtor took her to see a few homes, but she never went inside. He would leave her outside while he went in to ask the owners if they were willing to sell to Chinese, and the answer was always no.
But she didn’t give up.
That experience was repeated with a second realtor. A third wouldn’t even bother showing her around. Finally, a fourth helped her find a sympathetic seller. With deep gratitude, she moved into a quality home in a neighborhood where she felt safe raising my older sister.
She wanted to ensure that my sister and I went to college. When I graduated from high school, she brought out a stack of mutual fund statements dating back 18 years. The first showed that she opened an account for me with $100. Six months later, she added $10. Two months later, she added $25. Eventually, the deposits became monthly, and larger. By the time I was ready for university, there was enough to cover my education. I will never forget looking through those statements, thinking about how many years she had planned for that moment.
History from a woman’s perspective
I love the kind of history in books like “The Little House on the Prairie” series and Jane Austen novels, where readers learn how women and girls lived their everyday lives. I loved interviewing my mom and her siblings about the details of their childhoods and youth.
By the time my mom was 7, she was standing on a crate after school to fold and iron laundry with her sister, enduring taunts of “Ching-ching Chinaman” on the playground, and trying to reconcile what passed for normal in Jazz-Age America—where young women were cutting their hair short, wearing shorter skirts and dancing to jazz music—with her father’s vastly different cultural values.
Living in rooms behind the laundry, she dreamed of a real house. She dreamed of being fashionable like the weekly Jane Arden paper dolls she cut out of the Sunday newspaper. And she dreamed of winning her stern father’s affection.
But when her mother died suddenly, her father brought the family back to his ancestral village, where he left Mom and her five siblings, two still in diapers, with a new wife arranged by a matchmaker. He returned to the U.S. to pay down debts from his first wife’s medical bills and to earn money to bring his family back one or two at a time.
In the village, they stepped back a hundred years. They had lived poorly in America, but they had plumbing, electricity, a telephone and access to a doctor. In my grandfather’s village, there were none of these. There were outhouses, oil-wick candles, communication by letter and old wives’ tales in place of health care. Importantly, there was no social safety net during a period racked with political and economic turmoil.
In these situations, families make desperate decisions—whether to send a family member to another country, possibly as an illegal immigrant; whether to sell daughters to be servants to wealthy families; or sometimes even to commit infanticide. In the middle of all of this, the Sino-Japanese War broke out, with soldiers pillaging their poor village and Zero planes flying so low overhead, my mother could see the faces of the pilots.
I was moved by how the women of my family were subject to the social constructs of their day. The reason my grandmother died so young was because, despite chronic poor health, she would not forego having children until she had borne a son. She felt that was her purpose: to produce an heir to continue the family name. She did not feel she had status or value as a woman otherwise.
And she kept having girls. As much as I cannot imagine life without my aunties, cousins and their kids, my heart goes out to my grandmother and how much physical and mental anguish she endured because of that narrow worldview.
Similarly, my mother married at 20 because, even though she was supporting herself and had a comfortable rental situation, her aunt was saying, “King Ying (her Chinese name), it is time for you to find a nest. Time for you to get married, so that I will feel like you are settled comfortably.” And because my mother loved her aunt, she took this advice. When her boyfriend asked her to marry, she said yes.
However, she was not aware of an addiction he hid from her while they were dating. Soon, her life was deeply unhappy.
Amazingly, she didn’t imagine her life would improve if she divorced. Divorce was such a disgrace, leading to social isolation and censure for women, particularly in Asian culture, but even in American culture at the time, that she stayed in this unhappy relationship for 16 years.
When I was a kid, my mother’s cinematic stories most impressed me, like the one where she’s trying to get out of China during the Sino-Japanese War with Zero planes flying overhead. While I’m still fascinated by those scenes, today my heart is touched by her stories about the status of women over time.
When she finally got the courage to leave in the early 1960s, everything she feared came to pass. Immediately, her Chinese friends were trying to marry her off again. (As I sometimes joke, if nature abhors a vacuum, the Chinese abhor a single woman in her thirties.) Meanwhile, her American colleagues suddenly were not treating her with the same dignity and respect as when she was married, sending her spiraling into depression.
Immigrant history as American history
While we all journey to find a sense of belonging, a sense of where we fit into the world, immigrants and their offspring often face particularly great challenges, sometimes epic and often heroic.
My mother had to return to the U.S. alone at 16 during wartime. By 17, she was on her own. Much of the second half of the book details how she navigates mid-century America as a young, inexperienced, uneducated minority woman—what it was like practically and spiritually.
She and some of my aunts became live-in domestic workers, experiencing first-hand the poor way people treat the lowest person on the ladder in the privacy of their homes; the difficulty of finding a place to live in a decent part of town when landlords didn’t want to rent to people of her race; literally having doors slammed in her face; and even how the workplace often was segregated.
Eventually, my mother turned to being a waitress. That’s how she met my father, Tom, a customer at her restaurant. Dad, an Oklahoma farm boy who became a schoolteacher on the G.I. Bill following World War II, came to California for better pay. He said he first time he saw Mom, he thought she was stunning, but she looked so different from girls he had grown up with, that he wasn’t sure he could get used to her. That feeling soon passed.
At the time, interracial marriage wasn’t legal throughout the U.S. Even in states where it was legal, it was uncommon, and my parents’ friends and families had mixed feelings when they decided to marry.
Honestly, I think socially conservative Southern and traditional Chinese cultures have more in common than one might imagine. Neither Mom nor Dad believed in sex before marriage, and so they met in December, engaged on Valentine’s Day and married in March. They stayed married for over 50 years until my mother passed away. I don’t think you can do that unless you’re mostly on the same page.
I learned from them the value of getting to know people of different races by learning about their experiences and really listening to them.
I hope that by setting down these stories, I contribute to better cross-cultural understanding.
Through my mother, I saw that strength is not about force alone, but about endurance. Her story, filled with sorrow, grace, and joy, reminds me that the persistence of love, faith, and dignity can transform even the hardest landscape.